Feb 27
Very happy to return to Faversham’s fabulous festival to chat with Sarah Jane Butler and celebrate her debut novel, Starling, which I also had the pleasure to read as a PDF. Congratulations, Sarah – and Faversham Lit Fest!
Last year, my student writing group – The Writing Circle – wrote a collaborative piece about the experience of lockdown, “a year of this”. This year, we felt called to respond to COP26 and questions about climate change. How do we feel? What can we do? We work together online, writing to prompts in real time on a Padlet, a shared digital cork board. During half term, we printed the Padlet out, cut it into pieces, and pasted it together in a “real” room in the library – as well as online.
In these times of climate anxiety and powerlessness, it might feel like we can’t do much of anything to affect change. But staying engaged with our own thoughts and feelings is a start. We can refuse to be in denial about what we witness and experience. We can ask ourselves and each other difficult questions. The end result of our questions is currently installed in the COP26 Hub in the Creative Arts building at Canterbury Christ Church.
Whoop! Today is the UK paperback release of last year’s anthology, The Best, Most Awful Job, released in the early days of the pandemic – and also the US hardback release of same. No party ‘cept for a little online cheering – but there are some cheering blurbs by other folks as well as tweets and posts on social media.
Maybe you’d like to read? You’ll find me – and a whole lot more wonderful authors writing their hearts out.
I’ve written a lot about morning pages. I include them as a practice in the modules I teach, and I use them myself in a lot of different ways. But – what are they? And how do they work?
At the most basic level, morning pages are three pages of longhand – or 750 words on a laptop – free writing. They are not high art. They are not even ‘writing’. They are containers for anything and everything that crosses your mind. There is no wrong way to do them – and they are for your eyes only.
Morning pages are a system started by Dorothea Brande in her 1934 bestseller, Becoming a Writer, later revived by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. Both Brande and Cameron have strong ideas about what they should and should not be. Both advocate doing morning pages as early as you can manage them: Cameron insists that they be done by hand, while Brande is happy for them to be done by typewriter to help a writer build up stamina and increase output. I do them online at 750words.com – and have been doing so for more than 10 years now. The only real “rule” is to keep your hand moving. Try not to stop. Don’t think too hard about what you’re writing – you’re trying to access different ways of thinking – and definitely don’t stop to edit or rewrite. Morning pages are about generating new material – it can be polished later, if you like.
The best way to learn what they are – and what they can be for you – is to do them. After all, they are a practice, not a theory. They are done in the doing, not the planning. During the pandemic, I ran some creative workouts on social media, hoping to encourage people to experiment with writing in new ways. One such way was to consider how morning pages might benefit a writing practice as well as wellbeing. Here are some of the ways that I use morning pages. Maybe they can work for you?
FREE WRITE: Open a journal and a document and just write down whatever comes to mind. Don’t stop to think or censor. Sometimes we don’t know what we think until we can see what we say.
I AM: Sometimes prompts can get this writing going. They can be as simple as these: I am… I’m not… I want… I don’t want… I know… I don’t know… I feel… I don’t feel…
They can be time specific: Today I… Yesterday I… Tomorrow I…
All you need to add are simple nouns and verbs. Today I am… Yesterday I felt… Tomorrow I want…
From there, you can go anywhere – but if you ever feel stuck or run out of steam, you just circle back to the same prompt and begin again. What else is there to say? What else are you?
BRAIN DUMP: Is your brain full? Yeah, me too – sometimes. We all get busy heads – and living through a pandemic hasn’t helped. Morning pages are a great place to set down burdens. They are a container big enough and flexible enough to hold all our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes if we write things down, we can convince our brains that we are listening to them and taking their concerns seriously. After all, their job is to protect us. It isn’t their fault if they’re hyper-vigilant, scanning the world for danger. It isn’t our fault either. If your brain is full of chatter, see if you can empty it into morning pages.
ROOTING: Sometimes our heads are so full, they’re in a spin. We don’t know if we’re coming or going, whether we’re projecting forward in worrying or backward in regret. Morning pages can root us in the now. Centre yourselves in time and space, wherever you are. Write yourself into place, using all your senses.
What can you see? Describe it: colour, texture, shape and size. Lift your head – what else can you see?
What can you hear, beyond the sound of your own hand on the page or the keys? What small sounds are near you that you’ve stopped hearing? What can you hear far away? How far? What can’t you hear?
What can you smell? Does anything have a smell around you? Can you smell yourself – or does everything still smell of sanitiser? Maybe find something that can smell, so you have something to describe.
What can you taste? (Morning pages require big cups of tea, in my opinion!).
Lastly, what can you touch? Focus on the pressure between your hands and your words, the contact of your body with your writing: pen or keyboard. Plant your feet and feel how the ground supports you, holds you up. Sit back, aware of the contact between your body and the chair and floor. Feel how supported you are.
Touch also relates to what touches us. How do we feel in our clothing? How do we feel in our skin? Is there tightness or looseness? Where are the places we are feeling? Touch also refers to pressure, temperature, and sensations. How are you feeling? No, really. How are you really feeling?
LISTING: Who doesn’t love a list? Sometimes my morning pages are to-do lists. Often, they start out that way, so that I can clear my head of whatever it is I’m worrying about or afraid that I’ll forget. From there, I might examine the list to break it down into smaller steps or maybe to write about my priorities, what feels in balance and what does not. Sometimes I make larger, more intentional lists that might form long-term plans. What do I want to achieve this week or month or season? How do I want to feel? What am I not doing enough of? What would I really like to do? See if you can list 10 things – and then another 10.
PLANNING: When I’m low on time, I use morning pages as a planner, to lay out longer projects or to sketch out scenes. It means that, when you do have time to write, you’ll find you’ve already laid the groundwork out to get you started. No more blank page! You can read more about this process here:
CREATIVE PROMPTS: Where do ideas come from? Here is where morning pages get fun. After all, maybe you don’t want to start your mornings going over old ground or making laundry lists. Morning pages can be a creative space to start new pieces or projects through simple, one line fire-starters that can spark ideas.
Remember that you can always change tense and POV. If you always write in first person (I), work with second (you) or collective third (they). Here are some quick lines to get you going:
It was in the corner.
She wasn’t expecting that.
We could see it from here.
You hold it in your hand.
It had never been so cold.
Look out!
You can keep a jar of words or prompts that you find useful. Try first lines or last lines of novels or stories. The first whole sentence on page 100 of a novel is also usually pretty good. You can also find one through bibliomancy: open a book at random and find a sentence to use. Prefer a visual prompt? I have a Pinterest board for that: You can always Google “writing prompts” to find a million more – or visit storyaday.org.
I’ll be running a morning pages workout later in the summer. If you want to join in, sign up to the blog here or follow me on Twitter: @Peggy_Riley – Until then, whatever gets you writing – keep writing!
Three years ago, I started a writing group for students at the university where I teach, Canterbury Christ Church. It started as a place for students to get extra support with their work as well as a supportive environment where new work could get written.
Jump forward to the pandemic, and I moved the group online. In the only space where year groups could mix, we wrote together weekly. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can make intimate digital spaces – and the Writing Circle online has proved to be one such place. It’s been the joy of a rotten year to see the courage, resilience, and creativity of students and colleagues.
To celebrate the fact that we were able to keep writing together, I’m pleased as punch to announce our first anthology of work: SNAP! The title refers to the short, punchy nature of the work as well as its impetus – individual responses to the idea of a “card”.
When you think of a card, what do you think of? In SNAP! you’ll find stories about postcards, Valentine’s, and credit cards. You’ll find Tarot and Loteria and sentient playing cards. Mostly, you’ll find dazzling new fresh work made by students of all ages. What do you think?
SNAP! features work by BA and MA students: Helen Atkinson, Alexa Barrett, Bethany Climpson, Stephen Daly, Nicholas Huggett, Amanda Jones, Jessica Joy + fellow lecturer Sonia Overall – and me
Jan 21
Two weeks later, we watched that same Capital building and felt nothing but pride and possibility. We watched people – politicians and their families and those who were working there – treat each other with dignity and kindness. It didn’t blow all the memories away – nothing could do that – but it reminded us that there were other ways to be and live. I sobbed my way through the inauguration, and I say that without apology.
I feel like we got given a lot of things with a new president. But most of all, for me, it’s hope.
I’m having a little trouble with equilibrium this morning, trying to settle thoughts and feelings with the news. This America isn’t what I grew up saluting, slack flag in the corner, stars and stripes a little faded in the hot, dry California sun. We aimed ourselves at it each morning, slapped our hands on our hearts and parroted allegiance because they told us to.
You know how it goes:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
We all had a little trouble with indivisible. It came out invisible, often enough.
One nation, invisible.
Or invisible, liberty and justice. It isn’t for all, is it?
I am appalled by the awful privilege of white racism.
I am shocked by the complicity of police and politicians, who we were raised to respect.
I am sickened by losers who feel entitled to win.
I have lived in the UK for more than twenty-five years – yet, I am American. I remain an American writer.
My America is Melville, and Hawthorne, Dickinson and Steinbeck. My America is Baldwin, Morrison, Angelou, Langston Hughes. But my America is also Faulkner and Thoreau, O’Connor and Ingalls Wilder – and there are issues there, increasingly hard to overlook. (There are issues with Melville and Hawthorne too, come to think of it, which sends me spiralling backward: what is there within myself that I do not see clearly?). My America is so many writers: Jesmyn Ward and Terry Tempest Williams and Joan Didion and Leslie Marmon Silko and Scott Momaday and Louise Erdrich and and and.
When I was a teenager, I saw a Native American man crying on a sidewalk, clearly drunk and suffering. “They took my country,” he said, repeatedly, and I thought I understood his pain. I did not. When I went to a school dance with a classmate from Korea, my grandmother said white girls shouldn’t do such things, my Midwest grandmother born in 1902 who’d had Black servants and Black maids in uniforms serving canapes at her card parties in Pasadena. More than likely, I only rolled my eyes at her outdated view. When I dated a Black man, I didn’t tell my mother, so that I wouldn’t have to hear or acknowledge her thoughts. That shames me now. When I used to produce concerts, I found myself alone in my office paying a bandleader, a Black jazz pianist several decades older than myself who decided to kiss me, without invitation or consent, and stuck his tongue into my mouth with force and entitlement. I didn’t tell my mother – or anybody – about this either, for shame. That shames me now as well.
My country ‘tis of thee: a song I sang. A song we sang together. They sing that same tune here, though it has new words: God Save the Queen. After I’d been living in the UK for a while, I found myself back at my old primary school, where my mother also taught – first grade. I found myself at the flag ceremony, students gathered around this tall pole in the spring heat and this flag, flying freely. Few of the students were white. The catchment area has become increasingly Latinx. I watched those little bodies, those little hands on those little hearts, and found myself crying. I had no idea why.
America is an idea, but today I can’t remember what it was about. Maybe the idea will come back to me. Or maybe the delusion that sent armed invaders into the Capital to loot and take selfies has cast its net wider. Maybe we were all deluded that we could stand beneath one flag and feel the same.
Another lockdown. I wake in a spin. Half-heart, half-headless chicken, I beat myself against these morning pages, trying to figure out what to do – what to do – what to do.
At the end of a long and much-needed break from the university, I throw myself back into my teaching, full of big plans that I hope – I want – will make a difference to anxious students who feel let down by life. A new year, but January throws me headlong back into old fears and feelings – what is happening – what will happen – what should I be doing to help others to cope? And how will I cope myself?
Where do you put your fear? I believe that writing can help. Finding a container for our thoughts and feelings – to document them, record them, bear witness to them – can hold them for us as well as separate them from us, to give us some distance between ourselves and these thoughts and feelings. Once written, we can turn the page, find a new clean place and to keep going, to write beyond the churn and loop of questions and concerns. My own morning pages confirm the desire – the need – to offer that practice, somehow – here and to my students.
I have been tinkering with a morning pages workbook, and this third lockdown convinces me that it is more essential than ever. Fear works on our minds and bodies in a number of ways: we freeze, we stick, we want to run. I work with bright, young writers of all ages – and their fear is palpable. They’re afraid they’re missing opportunities and running out of time; they’re afraid their learning is being compromised. And while I seek to reassure them that their engagement need not change, even though the delivery system has, I can feel their disappointment and their disaffection.
I want to fix everything – but all I have are words. I can write my own to them, full of support and encouragement for their upcoming assessments; I can listen to theirs and seek to understand. And I can urge them to offer their own words up, to place their fears in their own containers – as well as one I’ll hold for them. Most of my ideas come through morning pages, and in today’s, I realise I want to create an anthology of student writing – Lockdown Pages, for lack of better words. I am so busy – we are all so busy – but I plan to pitch it as a project to my students on Monday: wish me luck.
Sometimes – and it feels like more often than not these days – I’m a lecturer in creative writing. As a writer, I bring my practice into classrooms and online workshop spaces for graduate and MA students. There are a lot of events and resources for students in creative writing – and I’m happy to be participating in one upcoming symposium – Creative Writing in Practice – with the University of Westminster. Here’s the schedule for all the events, including mine: I’ll be talking about how I write – and how I’ve worked with writers through the pandemic to keep words coming – for them and for me. The symposium is free: here’s a link to the Eventbrite site to learn more:
Oct 9
I want to write, but I don’t know why sometimes. I lose track of it. The world gets busy and I get in a spin. My mind chases solutions. I tell myself if I can only clear the decks first – get rid of this task, clear the items on the to-do list, that I will have the clarity to write. I tell myself this a lot. The fact of the matter is that every time I clear the decks they manage to fill themselves. A gust of wind from the world blows to-do leaves straight back on. The list gets ever longer. There is always something that needs doing. There is always something or someone who will call for our attention. How to find balance in this?
Some days, I spend all day trying to clear the decks, and find at the end of it that there is not enough time left for me. Or if there is time, that I feel spent. I am spent. There is no clarity then, even with the tasks all marked to done. There is only a ragged tiredness and the sad, slow feeling that I have let myself down somehow, particularly on a day spent trying not to let others down and trying not to let myself down where others are concerned.
There are times when I tell myself I will write first. I will attend to my needs before anyone else’s – other than the dog’s, obviously, who has no need for writing – how can that fill his dish? I tell myself that I will begin as I mean to go on – and sometimes I do. For days in a row I can start with my own work, particularly when it is already formed. Particularly when I am clear about the way forward with it, when I can see it already as the thing it is or will be.
What comes harder is the early work, the dream-state I need to be in to see the strange and tenuous links that will make something new from my questions, my desires, my research, my worries, my reading. This is, of course, what morning pages are designed to capture – and they do a good job of it, if I can keep my pages from straying into to-do list terrain.
During the pandemic, when the work load kept increasing, I began to write at the ends of days, as the emails were slowing, as the days were still long and bright. It was easy to keep working in the spring and summer when the nights were far away. Now it is autumn and the nights are drawing in. I stumble home from my writing shed in the dark. In this method, I can squeeze another couple of hours into my writing day – but the energy is different at the end than the beginning. Here, I use morning pages to draw a line under the work and try to give myself a fresh start, turning the page from one aspect of myself to another. It works well, but is there clarity? Sometimes. Sometimes there is just relief and exhaustion and another sad, slow feeling of regret. Is this how I spend my days?
How we spend our lives is, of course, how we spend our days. And we have a lot of demands on our time. We carve our precious 24 hours and 52 weeks into smaller and smaller parcels of time to be spent or sold or saved. It changes how we use our time, but it can’t make more of it. We can’t plant time-seeds. Or maybe we can. Maybe we can use the creative time we have, trying to figure out how to make more of it. I would like to.
There are days when this is all the time I have to write. These words. These morning pages. I can rattle through them in 12 minutes – 10 minutes at a pinch. Or I can savour them, as I did this morning. I can look up between paragraphs or phrases. Notice the sun through the window, how it casts shadows in triangles across the shed. Notice how the sunflowers are drooping. Notice that the tree I planted when my dog was a puppy is already turning orange. It is autumn, and I am in danger of missing it.
Maybe these pauses in morning pages can plant time-seeds. I notice time is passing. I check in with my old desires. Another season is coming. Will this be one in which I’m able to find more balance? Will this be one in which I save a little bit more time for me, like a seed I can still plant?
Peggy Riley 